Exit Wounds
by seven dials
Summary: Death, for an assassin, is never hard to find, and Ken long since stopped believing that they were all getting out of this one alive. He just never expected for any of them to have ended like this. Rated for violence and major character death.


**Exit Wounds**  
a _Weiss Kreuz_ fanfic by laila

Standard Disclaimer: Weiss Kreuz and all its characters, indices and related properties belong to Takehito Koyasu, Kyoko Tsuchiya, Project Weiss, TV Tokyo and no doubt several other entities I have either forgotten about or never heard of. This is a fan work written purely for fun, I make no profit and intend no disrespect to any of the individuals or companies concerned.

Author's Notes: Started at about the same time as _Through a Glass Darkly_ because I really am that big a glutton for angst-ridden punishment, this is an attempt at a loose (an _exceptionally_ loose, if you happen to know the original at all) reworking of a story entitled _Someone Else's Blood_ which I read several years ago, a fic which seemed to my mind to have an intriguing basic concept that I felt needed to be expanded upon. I mean no offense to the author of the original work by my authoring of this story, which takes that central idea and runs off with it in completely the opposite direction.

Warnings: Bad language, violence, gore and major character death.

* * *

From the day we first met, I knew that Aya Fujimiya would be the death of me.

Really, you couldn't blame me for thinking that. It seemed, when you remembered that the guy took one look at me and charged at me waving a katana screaming blue bloody murder about a girl I was almost certain I'd never bloody met, utterly logical. Omi saved me, that time: the kid had chided me gently for not covering myself better, and let the matter slide. Even someone as smart as Omi couldn't exactly plan for a lunatic with a katana – not even when he showed up in the shop one day not so long afterward, _hello, Siberian, this is your new teammate. Try not to kill one another, please._

Aya became a habit anyway. Later on, in the face of the fact he wasn't going anywhere, I revised my opinions a little. I guessed I wasn't being very fair. Aya… well, the guy was a lunatic, he made me look like the certified strategic bloody genius I really obviously wasn't, but he could be trusted not to, say, stab a guy just because he read the papers sometimes. Aya would be the death of me but, or so I always believed, at least he wouldn't have _meant_ to be.

That was what I told myself, anyway. Aya might have been difficult and maddening more often than not but there was no real, directed malice in it, at least not if your name wasn't Takatori. It was just Aya being Aya…

Just ordinary.

Ordinary like the flower shop, the clusters of giggling, over-made-up girls in their neat school uniforms, and pollen on my hands, something I had long ago stopped talking about, or even really thinking about. The flower shop – another evening of another nothing of a day and I cursed Youji as creatively as I could as I attacked the floor with the mop and pail. Honestly, the jerk would do anything to get out of clean-up duty, up to and including dragging a reluctant Omi round the shops for some kind of formal nightmare Youji insisted he'd need to get through the doors at that stupid political dinner we were due to fatally crash like nobody'd ever told him Omi _had_ a suit. At least Omi had the grace to look decently apologetic as Youji dragged him out the door: Youji not a bit of it.

In revenge for leaving me saddled with Aya and a dirty shop, I saddled Youji with my grocery list plus a little extra and the promise of Trouble if he tried to wriggle out of _that_, too. Ha. Have fun getting _that_ lot back in the Seven, asshole.

Too bad the thought of Youji struggling through the aisles of Kasumi (and it'd be madness at this time of night, something I hadn't bothered to fill him in on before he left) hunting for daikon radishes and sesame oil didn't make me feel any better. Chances were the guy would buy the wrong sesame oil and I'd only have to go tomorrow to pick up all the crap he'd forgotten anyway, and God knew I'd far rather have been buying groceries than mopping this fucking floor that would only need cleaning again tomorrow, anyway.

Christ, it was a beautiful evening, and here I was missing it: it didn't help to know I'd be out there as soon as the shop was tidy, not when I wanted to be out there now. The radio, playing quietly in the background, wasn't helping either. Even that Youji had fucked over for me, retuning it to some station playing that easy listening crap he liked, and when I got it back to J-Wave they were playing that shitty 'Near, Far' song from _Titanic_ again.

Fuck you, Youji, you lazy bastard, I thought, slapping the mop down hard upon the tiles; dirty water spattered the cuffs of my jeans, like I needed to get more annoyed than I was. Bastard, bastard, _bastard_.

No sign of Aya, either.

Correct that: there still wasn't. He'd vanished upstairs about half an hour back, leaving me with some cryptic non-explanation about there being something he had to do. I hadn't asked. Once upon a time, there would have been no need to when it would have meant I'm visiting my sister, have fun picking up the slack…

Problem with _that_ was the sister was up and about and Aya had gone from acting like everyone's idea of the doting big brother to a loser of a dad who didn't want to pay child support. He was ignoring her in the same over-the-top way he'd been hovering over her all the time she was out and _still_ hauling himself about the place looking pissy and martyred like none of us had any idea of the depths of his pain, so that was clearly out as an explanation of what the Hell he thought he was doing up there.

It was all the same thing anyway, it all meant _I don't want to clean the shop either_. Christ, as if I was any keener on clean-up duty than the rest of them!

I cursed Aya, then took it out on the mop, viciously wringing the water from it until I thought I heard it beg for mercy. The tiles could suffer, too, and I scrubbed them viciously for a few minutes and I wondered if Youji even knew what salmon flakes were and what the Hell was the point of this anyway? What the Hell was I doing apart from relocating grime? Shit, that probably meant it was time I changed the water.

I took that for what it was, an excuse to get out the shop for five minutes. Why should everyone else on the damn team have a monopoly on that? Dragging the bucket from the shop and out of the back door, I tipped the water down the drain – clearly there was some point to it, then. Another load of filthy water spattered my jeans and my shoes, making me seethe, then I thought _fuck it_. The shoes were ancient anyway and my jeans already needed washing. They could just be washed some more.

Okay, pink floor crap in bucket, bucket under tap, tap on. I straightened, nudging the bucket more squarely beneath the tap with one foot: I didn't exactly mean to gaze up at the fire stairs to the apartments but there I was with a bottle of floor cleaner in one hand, staring up them like I was expecting a naked model to come walking down any minute. No Aya, though: no sign of him. Oh, for God's sake. Running up the steps two at a time, I quickly fetched up at Aya's door with the wind tugging at my hair and at the ties of my apron, not at all out of breath and no less irritated. I wondered if it would be a good idea to pretend the door was Youji's face. Probably not, the last thing I wanted to do was get yelled at for fucking up Aya's door…

I knocked. Once, twice, like the police do on cop shows. Too bad I couldn't finish by kicking the door in. "Hey, Aya!"

Nothing. Hands set firmly on my hips I glared at the door, still stubbornly closed, as if this whole stupid situation was its fault. The door didn't seem to care. I counted to twenty, then counted ten more, before striking the door with the flat of my hand.

"Fujimiya! You _alive_ in there?"

Movement: I thought I heard something inside the apartment stir, then a large, solid object tumbling to the floor and landing with a heavy thump. I winced, stepping back a pace. What the _Hell_? Was Aya drunk or something? Couldn't be; he didn't drink, not really, and he'd only left a half hour back. I wondered if Aya was all right and if I should ask him and if there was even any point worrying – probably not, though. Guy could have been bleeding out and he'd have claimed he was fine now fuck off, Ken.

I knocked again, a little more cautiously. Well, Aya could get wasted and trash his apartment all he liked once the shop was cleaned up…

"What do you want?"  
He was obviously fine, then. "For God's sake! We got clean-up, remember? Quit slacking and help me out here!"

Aya murmured something noncommittal-sounding: it could have been _fine_, could have been _whatever_; it probably wasn't _fuck off, Ken_, and that was at least something.

"Just get your ass _down_ here, okay?"

And I walked away.

Of course by the time I got back down the mop bucket was overflowing. Jesus Christ, was _everything_ out to get me today? Barely resisting the temptation to kick the fucking thing over, I tipped the excess cold, pink foamy stuff down the drain and dragged the bucket back into the shop again, cursing under my breath.

Which is where I was ten minutes later when Aya finally showed his face: stuck in the shop making a big deal out of mopping the floor. I was damned if Aya was just going to waltz in here, pass some kind of sulky comment about how there was nothing for him to do because I was so nearly done, and then fuck off again – I thought he was damn lucky I didn't take his arrival as a sign to clear off myself, given how long he'd been sitting on his ass up there doing whatever the Hell it was Aya did when he was alone. It didn't seem like him to just up and leave, but slacking off didn't seem like him either and he'd done it, so I wasn't taking any chances.

"Nice of you to show up, Fujimiya," I said. "What the Hell were you doing up there?"

He said nothing, but I hadn't expected him to. Just gave me this strange sort of look as he walked to the storage closet, re-fastening the ties of his apron as he went. I raised my head a little to watch him from behind my hair, feeling like some kind of spy. He was – there was this look on his face, sharp and a little sly, and it made me feel antsy. There was something odd about that look. There was something _there_, some kind of intent, and I didn't like it.

I didn't like it one bit. I'd seen that look on his face before, but he'd only looked like that at me once – just the one time. I guessed it must have been ages back, because I couldn't remember for the life of me _when_. I just remembered it as bad, and that I was damn glad when it was over... why the Hell would he be looking at me like that, now?

Not like it mattered. It was just Aya being Aya and another reason to finish up fast and get the fuck out of here. Clean-up duty with Aya was bad enough when he acted normal, after all.

I sighed and carried on mopping the floor, a bit more vigorously this time. I always figured purgatory was something like this. A beautiful evening, the fast-setting sun shining through the windows and the world looking busy and inviting just beyond them – and here's me stuck in the shop cleaning up with Aya, for the next thousand years, and the radio's playing that shitty _Titanic_ theme.

Then there was a sudden click, and I flinched. I raised my head again, feeling myself start to frown.

"What'd you do that for?"

Aya had turned the radio off. I straightened, setting one hand on my hip – would have been both, but I didn't want to have to pick up the mop again after and somewhere in the back of my mind there's fucking Youji right on cue telling me that makes me look like a pissy housewife – and I stared at him. He just stood there by the radio, one hand resting on the off switch, eyes half-hidden by his bangs. It was kind of creepy, actually.

"Aya?"

And still he wasn't speaking.

Of course, Aya had this reputation as a quiet, mysterious guy who, if the girls were to be believed, communicated by grunting and semaphore. I lived with the guy, though; I knew better. I knew damn well he could talk if he wanted to, he just usually didn't. He was never this quiet this deliberately. His silences were the result of him just plain not wanting to talk: it wasn't because he was holding back or trying to hide. He simply had nothing to say.

This wasn't his usual silence. This was different, I could feel it, this was _weird_. This, along with the look on his face and the way he was staring at me, was _really_ beginning to freak me out.

"Geez, man," I said, and my voice seemed too loud in the silence, and I was talking only to fill it, "I know you don't like my music but do you have to be a _total_ fuckwit about it?"  
"We don't need the radio," Aya said, and his voice was no different from usual, he sounded just as disinterested as he always did. But then he said, "Don't you have anything else to worry about?" and he raised his head a little. He met my eyes, and the look in his own was – it was weird, that was all. Even for him, it was weird.

What did he mean, anything else to worry about? I glanced about myself, casing out the room like it was a target's office and I'd never been here before, checking out the exits and the telephone sat by the till. My grip tightened round the mop handle. What the fuck was going on here? I might have been on a mission and not realized it. I was tense, I was edgy, everything felt wrong—but Mother of_ God_, how wrong could it be? This was Aya, and I was in the shop: I had to remember that. I was just in the shop, and I was cleaning the floor.

"Are you going to help me clean, or are you just going to fuck around and talk cryptic bullshit? Turn the _radio_ back_ on_."  
"It's not necessary," Aya replied, cool as ever. "Not now."  
I was losing my patience now. "Oh, for Christ's sake Aya! Just fucking cash up or something, I want to get out of here sometime before midnight."

He said nothing. Aya just looked at me strangely for a long moment – it was like he wanted to ask me something, but somehow couldn't – then he muttered something I couldn't quite catch and walked off. Turned his head like he wanted to erase me completely and strode over to the register as if he was about to demand that it bought something or left. The legs of the chair scraped slightly against the tile as he sat down and if it seemed weird that he _was_ cashing up just because I had suggested he do it, at least he was doing something.

He didn't turn the radio back on. Well, I didn't either.

And I thought it was over, for a little while. I really, really thought that was where it all would end. We'd close the shop and the others would come back and the evening would get closer to being over, and everything would be normal.

The next thing I knew he was coming at me with a knife.

I'd been a real fucking genius with the floor this evening. Normally I start at the back and work to the door but I'd been so mad when I started I hadn't been thinking it through, I just dragged the bucket to the door and started work. Now I'd done the stockroom and most of the store along with it, with the bit by the windows left to go. Brilliant, I know. I'd have to walk back across the clean bit to get out the door. That meant I'd have to mop up _again_ after me because my _shoes_ would be dirty, but so many things were fucked up about this evening that I didn't really care any more. So I wiped up behind me, so what. At least the floor would be clean.

So I was mopping up by the windows, big deal. I wasn't thinking about anything very much. Dinner, maybe, and how it'd have to be something with noodles because we didn't have any rice, and if Youji didn't get back soon it'd be take-out. I was humming something; I couldn't remember what.

I shouldn't have been by the windows, but I was. That was what saved me.

The chair scraped slightly against the floor again as Aya got to his feet. It was only then I realized that, in all the time he'd been sat there, Aya hadn't done a goddamn thing. He'd just opened the till, tipped the evening's take onto the counter, and sat there shuffling the notes and coins into piles and staring into space. What the Hell was the matter with that guy this evening?

He was moving now, padding quietly through the body of the shop. I looked up just enough to give him a dirty look then bent to continue mopping the floor, but a motion in the glass caught my eye. _Aya_.

It was getting dark out now. The sun was sinking fast and the street lights had come on sometime while I was mopping the floor. It wasn't quite night yet but even so, it was dark enough it was getting harder to see what was out the window, and easier to see the room behind me – easy enough so that, when I raised my head, I could see Aya's reflection swimming toward me in the glass. Head slightly lowered, his eyes hidden by shadow, something bright and metallic was gleaming in one of his hands.

I didn't stop to think about it, just reacted. In the second or so it took me to kick the mop pail away and over, sending water sluicing across the tiles and turning the floor into a skating rink, I was already straightening, the mop falling from my hands as I turned to him – I wanted to curse, or to grab him by the shoulders and scream at him, _what the Hell do you think you're doing?_ – so the knife, which should have plunged straight into my back, merely caught me a glancing blow across one shoulderblade, scraping agonizingly down and across several of my ribs before I managed to drive one elbow into Aya's chest, shove him away hard enough to prove that I meant it.

Ami Suzuki. That was it. I'd been humming _All Night Long_.

"What the _fuck_!" Instinctively I pressed one hand to my side, hissing in pain as my fingers brushed the wound there: I nearly cursed out loud when my hand came away bloody. "What was _that_ for?"

The mad bastard had stabbed me.

Everything happened so fast after that.

I wasn't thinking. There was no time to think. When I turned and met his eyes, Aya was standing there with the knife in his hand and he just looked at me like I was missing the point and then he lunged at me again and I think I must have screamed. The blade, smeared with blood – _my_ blood – flashed as it caught the light, as his hand arced back toward me and I kicked him.

The kick landed just a couple inches shy of home base. He stumbled backward and I went for him, snatching for his shirtfront and aiming a blow to his jaw and I lost my footing on the slippery floor and down we both went. He hit the ground hard, the knife skittering from his grasp and I landed on top of him and tried to punch him again but before I knew what was happening his knee was in my gut, knocking the wind out of me. Aya followed it up with a punch to the face that left me seeing double and, as I was wiping my mouth and trying to blink my vision clear, he pushed me back to the floor and went for his knife.

Here we go again. I raised my head just in time to see him grab the knife and then he was lunging at me, forcing me back to the wet floor. My tee-shirt was getting soaked. It felt gross.

"Jesus _Christ_!" I barely recognized my own voice. "Aya! What the Hell are you _doing_?"  
And there was that look again, as if he couldn't believe how dumb I was being. "Be quiet, Ken."

Fuck _that_.

I didn't scream because I was frightened. I screamed because it would really piss him off. I guess it worked because he smacked me in the face again and showed me the knife like that was supposed to make me behave, shoving it right at my face and all I could think of to do was grab for the blade and it hurt. I would have screamed again only he was forcing the breath out of me. Hard enough to breathe right. My arm was trapped between us and I was scratching at his chest, trying to get him away from me but it was all wrong and he wouldn't move. The crazy bastard just wouldn't move, though I cursed and scratched his chest and spat at him.

Aya smelled. He smelled of sweat and the flower shop and his laundry powder, and the cigarettes he cadged off Youji when he thought I wasn't looking, as if I cared that he smoked. He was lying on top of me, breathing hard, and his eyes were flat and crazy and he was scrabbling at my pants like what he really wanted was to fuck me and waving a knife around was his insane idea of getting me in the mood. Now would be a _really_ good time for Youji to get back!

"You're fucking _heavy,_ you bastard!" I shoved at him again. "Get _off_!"  
All Aya said was, "Quiet, Ken."

And he put his hand hard over my mouth, his nails digging into the skin of my cheek.

I bit him.

Bit him hard, until I tasted blood, until I heard him yelp. He was clawing at my cheek, nails raking against my jaw—I let go and Aya pulled away, cradling his wounded hand against his chest, and I shoved him off me, knocking him onto his back and scrambling to my feet. He didn't let go of the knife.

"Bastard," he muttered, or something that sounded very like it, and that sounded so weird coming from _him_ that I heard myself start to giggle.  
"Stay back," I said, like they do in movies: it sounded just as stupid and panicky now as it always did on screen. My hand was bleeding. "Stay _away_ from me!"

Christ, if only I had a weapon. If I could just get his knife off him, or—or something, anything at all just as long as it got him to stop this!

I was backing away from Aya now, eyes fixed on him as he slowly got back up. Damn the situation but I felt like a idiot, carefully edging backward to the register and the phone with my hands raised before my chest like I was trying to stop him hitting me and please _God_ don't say he cut the line… but I wasn't going to turn my back on the mad bastard, _no way_, not when he was trying to fucking _kill_ me and I don't want to die, I was thinking. Oh, God, I don't _want_ to _die_! I wanted something between us. A closed door, a table, the counter… fuck it, a _chair_ would have done!

I guessed I could maybe make it to the stockroom, lock myself in there and hope like hell that the door held until Omi and Youji got back and all I'd have to do was get past Aya. Christ, if only I hadn't locked the front door! There was the door, but there was Aya: he was back on his feet now, waiting for God knew what. Back prowling toward me with that goddamn knife in his hand and he was moving too slow, but what did _he_ have to run for?

"Aya," I heard myself saying, and I still sounded like a stupid, panicky idiot, "Aya, _drop _the_ knife_. I don't know what's gotten into you or what the Hell I did to piss you off this bad but we can _talk_ about it. _Put _the _knife_ _down._"

That was like the movies, too.

"No," was all Aya said in response. I couldn't place how he sounded, but that was all off too. "No, Ken. We can't."  
"Why the Hell not? Drop the fucking _knife_, Aya!"  
He laughed. Not like a psycho would, but like I'd told him a joke that wasn't very funny. I wanted to punch him. "You wouldn't understand."  
"Try me."

And he tried to stab me again. I stumbled backward, knocking into the shelving so hard I felt it shaking, heard the pens and books we kept there fall the floor. I think I must have been screaming again as the knife tore into my arms and it could have been worse, a Hell of a lot worse, if it hadn't had my arms raised in the first place that would have been my face or my throat. I lashed out blindly, landing a kick to his chest that had him stumbling backward and away and I ran for it, nearly falling over the register as I snatched for the phone, stabbing at the keypad and to Hell with secrecy, I was thinking, Aya's gone off the deep end and I _don't_ want to fucking _die_! Fuck Omi, fuck Kritiker, just call the cops!

There was a woman on the other end. She sounded calm. She sounded nice and helpful and I think she would have helped me if I'd only had the time to talk to her—Aya lunged for me from behind, grabbing a fistful of my hair and yanking my head back, and the knife blade flashed like the worst kind of crappy cinema as he jabbed for my throat. I heard myself screaming, grabbing the blade with my bare hand and kicking him hard in the leg and down he went again and so did I.

I recovered first. I'd landed on Aya, and that had cushioned my fall. Rolling off him, I found myself lying on my front by the display cases and staring at a broken chair I didn't remember pitching over, and at the telephone handset, lying just a little out of reach by the table. There was blood smeared on the plastic, but it didn't appear to be damaged.

All I knew was I didn't want to die. Get help, was all I was thinking. Just get help – you can deal with the rest of it later…

There was the phone, and I reached for it.

And then there was Aya. Aya, grabbing at my wrist, holding so tight I thought my bones might break. He was dazed, I could tell by the look in his eyes. He'd hit his head on – on something, Christ knew what, maybe only the floor, but not enough, God damn it! Nowhere near hard enough! Why couldn't the mad bastard have knocked himself out? Aya. Staring right at me like he was setting up for the sequel and reaching for (Mary mother of _God_!) for that _fucking_ knife.

"Sorry, Aya!"

There was just enough time for Aya's expression to change before I grabbed him by the forehead, fingers tangling in his bangs, and smacked his head down hard against the tiles. He hissed something that could have been a curse and writhed beneath me, fingers digging painfully into my wrist, so I dragged him back up and did it again. And again, and again, until his grip slackened about my arm and his hand fell heavily to his side. Until he finally stopped moving.

All I wanted was for him to stop moving. I fell back to the floor, breathing hard.

_Hello_, said the lady on the telephone. _Hello, caller, are you there?_

But now he wasn't moving and it wasn't what I'd wanted. He always did this, he _always_ fucking did this to me like he thought it was fun or something to drive me crazy—Aya, you dumbshit, that wasn't what I meant at all! Moving as carefully and quietly as I could, I reached for the phone and broke the connection. It's nothing. It was an accident…

I guess I knew even then that something was wrong with Aya. An accident, I was thinking, that's all. Just an accident—I got up, returned the phone to its cradle. I righted the fallen chair, and tried to smack a broken strut back into the hole it had popped out of, and told myself it was nothing that some wood glue wouldn't fix as long as only Omi used it from now on. I picked up the fallen books and pens and left them in a heap on the shelves I'd bumped into, though they were dripping wet from the water on the floor, and smeared with blood where I'd touched them. There wasn't enough mess. Aya had tried to kill me and all it came down to was some spilled water and ruined order books, and a chair that would be fine for a bit of wood glue.

And Aya. Aya lying on the floor and the minute I laid eyes on him again I knew I'd hit him too hard. I'd seen enough dead bodies to know one when I saw one. Living men didn't have blood leaking from their heads like that. Living men, even unconscious ones, breathed or shuddered or—

The word I was looking for was _movement_. And Aya just lay there like I'd broken him in two.

"Oh God," someone was saying, and it had to be me because there was nobody else here who could be talking. "Oh Jesus. Oh God…"

I just managed to make it to the stockroom sink before I threw up.

Raising my head Christ only knew how long later, I wiped at my mouth, wincing and coughing weakly, and groped for the faucet. It seemed to take a long time for me to turn it on and my hands, as I held them beneath the steady stream of too-cold water, were shaking so bad it was a wonder I'd managed it at all. For a moment I simply stood there, hands beneath the faucet, staring at my lacerated forearms and my own sticky blood, washed away by the water to spiral slowly down the drain. I didn't have a clue how I should have been feeling – sad? Guilty? Frightened? What I felt was _nothing_. I just felt empty. If I'd stepped outside, I guess I'd have just blown away.

My arms ached. My shoulder and side throbbed painfully, and blood seeped slowly into my already gore-spattered tee-shirt. I knew I was hurt, but it didn't seem to matter very much. What could I have done about it, anyway, called a goddamn _ambulance_? Don't mind the corpse in the middle of the floor and can I see a doctor now, please?

I almost laughed. I glanced back over my shoulder and what the _fuck_ was I so afraid of? He's dead, I was thinking, over and over. He's dead, you're gonna be all right, _he's dead_ and that wasn't okay at all.

"He's dead," I said, like I was trying it out to see how it sounded. "Aya's _dead_."

Christ, there was blood _everywhere_. It was smeared over the edge of the sink; it was on the faucets and the worktops and spattered across the floorboards; there were my footprints clear as anything, just the kind of trace evidence we'd always been warned to avoid. My apron was covered with… with _stuff_, body stuff I didn't want to have to identify. I tried to wipe it off, but it clung and my hands left bright red smears all over the fabric. I tried to tear off my apron, but only managed to hurt my neck. At least it was mostly my blood, out here.

That had been a dumbassed thing to think, of course. I thought – I couldn't help myself, it flowed as natural as Matthew to Mark – thought of _Aya_, or of something that had been Aya ten minutes ago, lying in a puddle of filthy water, blood seeping slowly from his smashed head and matter trapped in his hair. I gagged, clapping one hand over my mouth, and puked into the sink again.

As I splashed water over my face, carefully tried to rinse the worst of the blood from my still-bleeding arms, I thought, _I should hang for this_. Maybe Youji would do it, save the executioner a job…

I was shaking, I realized. I tried to turn the tap off, but my hands weren't working properly and Aya was dead, anyway. He was dead and I was dying and it couldn't matter any more. I was wasting water and _Ken Hidaka_, Sister Helena was saying, _go back and turn that tap off, there are children dying of thirst in Africa_ – and I didn't care. I just didn't care. I felt my legs give under me and I slumped heavily to the floor, back braced against the stock cupboards, wrapping my arms about my knees. It didn't matter, not now. Everything was fucked anyway.

I didn't know what to do, so I did nothing: I just prayed, though to who and for what I don't know.

And they came back. There was Youji's car pulling into its usual spot – and I knew it was his, nobody else round here has a car that sounds like Youji's does – there were doors slamming and a key scraping in the back door's lock, and the sound of footfalls. I didn't move. I didn't call out to them, because I knew my voice would have betrayed me. They'd come to find me and they'd see the sin on my face and then it would be all up with me, too, and I didn't want to die. Besides, what would I say? What was there to tell them now? _Aya's dead?_ I wondered if they could smell the blood.

God knew how long I'd been sat there with nothing to do but count my breaths, and stare at the blood on the floor, and think about Aya and pray. It could have been no more than a minute or two, it could have been more than an hour. That didn't matter, either. Youji and Omi were back, and they were back too late. That was all.

"We're home!" The voice was Omi's, calling out to a dead guy and to me, huddled by the sink and shivering, though I wasn't cold. "Sorry we're so late! The traffic was terrible and Youji-kun just insisted that the first three suits weren't right _at all_, so we had to keep looking and the one he finally decided he liked they didn't have in my size, so…"

It was just sound. Omi was talking and I couldn't make sense of a word of it. They were home late and Aya was dead and it didn't have to be this way. If only they had been back sooner, or never have left at all. If only someone had _been_ here, Aya would still be alive…

I hated myself.

Omi's voice broke off abruptly and, from somewhere in the shop, I heard a _crash_ as someone dropped a shopping bag. I imagined a bag of flour bursting, or maybe it was the rice, and a bottle breaking, spilling wine or oil or soy sauce – no, not soy, the bottles are too strong – all over the tile to mix with Aya's blood. When I was making the shopping list Youji had asked for teriyaki beef and God knew why I'd agreed, and beef was expensive. I just hoped whichever bag had gotten dropped, it wasn't the one with the beef in it.

Someone shrieked. I thought it was Omi.

I heard him running. I heard him fall to his knees, screaming Aya's name. _Aya-kun, Aya-kun, open your eyes! _I heard Youji shouting – what the _Hell_ happened here? – dumping the bags he must have been holding down so hard that the jars and packages inside them rattled. He was cursing over and over, swearing like another man might pray. Call an ambulance, Omi was shouting, and Youji said, fuck, where's Ken?

He sounded angry: I didn't blame him. My friends were hurting and frightened, and it was all my fault. Aya was dead and I was the man who killed him. From the minute we met, I knew he'd be the death of me…

"Ken!" Youji was shouting. "_Ken_, where are you?"

That was when I started to cry.

Youji. Oh Christ, _Youji_: his hand was on the door, jerking roughly at the handle as if he wanted to tear it off. Like he wanted to break the door down, and was pissed I hadn't locked it. I wanted to get up and run, but what good would that do? I wanted to push myself further back into my corner, but that was stupid too… I didn't try to move. I just swallowed, fighting back a sudden rush of nausea and panic, and watched as he yanked open the door and stood there framed in it, glaring down at me like God to a sinner. Feeling very young and scared and small, I raised my head from my knees and blinked up at him from behind my bangs.

"Jesus _Christ_, Hidaka! What the fuck did you just—!"

Youji stopped short, choking on his own words. The look on his face gave this painful kind of _shift_, as if something had hurt him. I wondered what he'd seen. I wanted to ask him if he was okay, but I couldn't find my voice.

"Ken?" he said. He spoke quieter now; he sounded almost confused. "What happened?"

I didn't know what to say to him, so I just raised my hand.

"My arms," I said. My voice sounded weird in my ears. Then, "I… I didn't _want_ to, Youji. I promise. It was me or him, I swear to God."  
Youji pulled a face. "Christ, Ken. How much blood have you lost?"  
I blinked. I think I giggled. "He had a knife. He…" I broke off. Tried to push the hair out of my eyes. "Jesus _fuck_, Youji, I knew he hated me but I didn't think it was this bad, I dunno what the Hell I did but he just lost it and I had to, he wouldn't stop, I swear, he just… he _wouldn't fucking stop_."  
Youji closed his eyes as if something was hurting him, he heaved a sigh. Said, "It's okay, Kenken. I believe you."  
"Really?"  
"Really." He tried to smile and it came out all wrong. "Come on, get out from there. You need a doctor."

I couldn't believe that he believed me, but I didn't argue. Feeling like a kid who'd escaped a scolding they knew damn well they deserved, I wiped at my eyes with the back of my hand and, when Youji held out his own hand, I took it. It hurt when he touched me, it hurt like Hell, but I figured I deserved the pain.

I didn't know how long I'd been down there, but it must have been a while because there was cramp in my legs when I tried to make myself move and, when Youji helped me get up, I stumbled. For a moment, as everything grew vague and dark as if the room were filling with smoke, I wondered if I was going to black out. I didn't, though. Just stood there slumping against Youji as I waited for the head rush to wear off, and let him guide me out to the break room and down to sit on one of the couches. Wait here, he said, and I didn't argue with that either.

"Omi!" Youji yelled. "_Omi_, we've got a problem!"

Omi appeared in the doorway, blood smeared across his palms and up the length of his bare arms. The kid was too pale, he looked sick and frightened, but he wasn't crying. Not yet. He stopped short when he caught sight of me, his breath catching in his throat, and he said my name in a voice which trembled.

I said, "He tried to kill me."  
Omi stared at me. He said, "But… Ken-kun, why would Aya-kun _do_ that?"  
"Jesus _fuck_, Omi, _I_ don't know!"  
"Oh God, Ken-kun." Omi took a deep, shuddering breath, then another. He fought to calm himself, to be Bombay, and I didn't know how he could. He'd loved Aya, or come as close to it as Omi ever could, and now Aya was dead and Omi was being _Bombay_ about it. "Oh—_God_. I… All right. Okay, I'll call Manx. Youji-kun, get Ken-kun bandaged up and get him to the hospital, you'd better take Aya-kun's car. Tell them…" He hesitated. "Tell them we were robbed."

And that became the story.

It was the story Youji told at the hospital, when we walked into the ER and the triage nurse took one look at me before hurrying me through a set of swing doors and into a white-walled cubicle, ordering me to undress and lie down before shouting for doctors and units of blood and _he's type B_, Youji was saying. _That's his blood type._ It was the story he told the police when a group of grave-faced detectives showed up two hours later and photographed my injuries and went away again with a statement that made more sense than the truth, and my clothes in an evidence bag. It was the story when I told them the tale they expected to hear about a pair of masked men who had attacked me while I was cashing up, and trusted that Manx would sort it out. If they uncovered my sins and hanged me, then they hanged me. I couldn't care any more.

And, when Youji took me back not to our home but to a hotel overlooking the bay, telling me it was best for everyone if I kept my head down for a few days and he'd be back with my stuff as soon as he could, that was the story the lady on the ten o'clock news was telling the whole of the city. If it was on the TV, I could almost kid myself it was true.

There was a man in a windbreaker, stood before a ring of yellow tape fencing off our store, and he told the story too.

Aya looked good on the television. On the news he was a hero. I was just a footnote, the still-hospitalized workmate whose life he had saved at the price of his own. I don't know how I felt about that but they'd given me some pills when I was at the hospital and I wasn't feeling much of anything by then, except tired. All I knew was this was the last thing Aya had meant. He had never wanted to be seen as a hero. _Never_.

Youji showed up with my things just in time to catch the round-up at the end of the show, and he stood and watched it with me for a while. It was easier, at that moment, to look at the TV than to look at one another.

"Why are you watching this?" he asked after a while.

I couldn't have explained that one even to myself, so I didn't try to explain it to him. I just shrugged.

"Ken," he said finally, turning from the TV, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have taken so long. We should have been there—"  
"What would that have changed?" I asked. He was looking at me now and I looked away, at my bandaged hands. I guess a stranger'd have pegged me as suicidal. It almost seemed like an improvement. "If you guys had been there he'd just have waited until the next time you weren't."  
"You really think he wanted to kill you?"  
"_Christ_, Youji, I don't know what he wanted. I… it was Aya. I don't think anything'd have stopped him, once he decided that was what he was gonna do. Nobody ever fucking could tell him no. Never."

I could feel him looking at me, so I lifted my head and looked back. I didn't want to have to look at him, didn't want to see the look on his face, but sometimes it gets to a point where not to know is worse. Even if he hated me, even if he was staring at me like I'd become something horrible, I had to know…

But he simply looked like Youji, after all. Just ordinary.

I said, "I didn't want to kill him, Youji."  
"I know you didn't, Kenken." The really weird thing was it sounded like the truth. Youji really did believe me and I didn't know how he could. "You had no choice. This isn't your fault, okay? None of this is your fault. Get some rest, okay?"

Of course I didn't believe a word of it, but it was easiest to agree.

I thought he'd go home after that, but he didn't. Youji was there when I went into the bathroom to wash and change out of the scrub suit they'd given me when I left the hospital; he was still there when I got into bed, sat in an armchair like he wanted to put down roots and flicking through the only book he could find, which probably meant the _Gideons_ bloody _Bible_. I guess he just didn't want to go back to the shop either and I didn't blame him for a minute. It would be madness there. Birman could deal with it, Aya was her bloody stupid idea…

I would have asked him what was going to happen to me if only I had given a shit, but I didn't. I just didn't care any more. All I wanted was sleep.

* * *

The girls grieved for him of course, but they got it all wrong. They cried for Aya like they'd have cried over a pop star or an actor, some pretty-boy pinup they'd never met and didn't really matter. They hugged one another and wept, they bought our flowers and laid them reverently by the door like it was the door to his tomb and said they'd never forget him, ever. All we needed to complete the picture was one or two of them to top themselves over him, but they didn't. None of them went quite that far.

God knew what they thought they were proving, or who they were doing it for: it wasn't Aya, I knew that much, and it sure as Hell wasn't for us. This whole fucked-up situation hurt bad enough without a bunch of silly little kids who'd never really known Aya at all acting like this was as much their loss as it was ours…

Sakura didn't show up once. I didn't blame her.

I was well out of the worst of it, lying low in a room at the Nikko, and if I wasn't anyone's prisoner then I wasn't exactly free either. I suppose I had Kritiker to thank for that, them and the cover story that said I should have been laid up in hospital and needed me out the way of the cameras. Technically I guess I could have left any time – if I'd just got clear of the city they probably wouldn't even have bothered coming after me – but even if I'd had the energy to make a break for it, I just didn't care enough. If Kritiker wanted to punish me, I would have let them. They could have sent Birman in to put a bullet through my brain and I wouldn't even have tried to struggle.

It was a week before the investigations were over, eight dull and dead days before Manx came to the hotel and told me that my story checked out, and I was free to return home. I'd spent most of the time asleep or watching endless hours of junk TV and listening to _All Night Long_ so often the batteries on my CD player went flat, and all that awaited me at home was more of the same damn thing I had here, just with Omi trying to look like he didn't blame me and Youji's unbearable fucking _empathy_…

And a small, ugly part of me that couldn't understand why they were so determined to treat Aya's death at my hands like a tragedy, when Kase's had just been work.

"We should do something with his stuff."

I said that one morning a week or so later, after Omi had left for school.

The kid was taking it hard. Oh, he was doing his damndest not to let it show and doing a damn good job of it too – but Youji and me, we just knew him too well to be fooled. He was tired, he was angry and upset, he simply didn't know how to deal with me any more. A couple of days back Youji had told me he'd caught Omi standing in the break room holding Aya's usual mug in both hands; when I came down this morning, the mug had disappeared from the rack. I hated the fact he was hurting but what the Hell could I _do_ about it, when I was the only reason he was hurting at all?

Aya's death had been far tougher on him already than it had been for Youji or for me. Omi always had liked Aya a lot better than either of us did, and we were (and it was fucking horrible, really, but it was just the way things had worked out) we were _used_ to this shit, we'd been through it all before, just with the names and faces changed. Omi, though? He wanted somebody to blame, some convenient bad guy he could feel perfectly easy about hating – he'd always had that before – and all he had was me.

It was bad enough that I'd killed someone he'd come close to loving. What made it worse was Kritiker, who he wouldn't even have known how not to trust, said it wasn't my fault. He couldn't deal with the concept of an untimely death it was impossible to avenge. Omi's world didn't work that way.

"What do you mean," Youji asked, "we should _do_ something?"

I hadn't really meant to say anything of the sort, of course. I just knew we still had all Aya's things and it seemed wrong somehow. Wrong to keep it, doubly so to track down his sister and leave _her_ to deal with it, and pretty much everything I'd owned as a kid I'd ended up with because someone else's children didn't need it any more…

"I mean pack it up, or… give it away or something." It sounded awful, but I'd committed myself now. "We shouldn't just leave it all lying around. What if… someone else needs that room sometime, and all his stuff's still in there? Aya's _dead_, Youji. He doesn't need it any more."  
For a long moment Youji just looked at me. I thought he looked tired. Then he sighed, reaching for his cigarettes and tugging one from the packet in his teeth. "You've got a point. I'll mention it to Omi. In the meantime… well, I guess we can at least _clean up_ in there a bit."  
"I'll do that," I said. "I owe him that much at least."

I remembered Aya's room, on the handful of times I had seen it, as clean, tidy and impersonal, as impersonal as the hotel room I had run to after leaving him dead on the shop floor – no, even more so. It was almost as bare as a cell. It was a room that gave nothing of its occupier away, except perhaps for the stuff he liked to be seen reading and though Youji said you could tell a lot about a guy by what he had on his bookshelves, I didn't know enough about books to do that. It wasn't a place I could imagine anyone going to relax, or to hide from the world and their responsibilities.

All Aya's room had ever told me up until now was here was a guy who was clean and neat to an almost pathological level, and who had always been ready to leave us.

The difference this time was that the room felt dead. I didn't think there had ever been any real sign of life in that damn place, but now it was gone I felt it. There was nobody to much care if I went into Aya's room now, but after I unlocked his door I found myself hesitating on the step, one hand resting on the doorknob. Walking into that bedroom felt like I was disturbing someone's tomb. The air smelled stale, and when I walked to the window to open it, there was a thin film of dust on the sill. I ran my fingers along it, pulling a face at the sight of it.

If anything brought it home to me that Aya was gone, really, truly gone for good, it was that. I slumped down heavily on Aya's bed – I don't think I ever did that before – disordering the far-too-tidy sheets and even Sister Helena hadn't been that obsessive about bed making. For a long moment I simply sat there, staring at the absolute careful _nothing_ that was Aya's room, wondering what kind of a man could ever have felt at home in a cold and empty place like this.

Maybe that was – had been – the point. Maybe he just hadn't _wanted_ to feel at home.

Totally fucking _dumb_, of course. It was the kind of stupid-ass thing a guy _would_ do if he'd always had a nice house and a family to come back to, and he didn't think that any house without them could ever truly be a home. Too busy being sad that he'd lost it to be grateful that he'd ever had it at all…

This was making a kind of production number out of loneliness, speaking almost of a sick sort of pride. Mary Mother of God, no wonder we'd never got on.

The room felt so dead and so obviously unlike the abandoned room of any other dead person I'd ever come across that it took me a while to realize that it also felt wrong. I hadn't been in Aya's room often, and even on those occasions I was never there for very long, but something about it had been different then and it hadn't just been Aya's presence. There was something out of place here, but there was so goddamn little to choose between it took me a long time to work out what.

There was a box resting on Aya's cabinet, a box I seemed to remember being on top of the shelves before. Getting up from the bed, I went to pick it up: I was thinking, perhaps, to shove it back on top of the shelves, but when I lifted it the lid was hanging loose. Confused, I took the box back to the bed, placing it down next to me and just looking at it for a moment. It seemed weird Aya would have left something he'd always kept well away from the rest of us that out of place, and weirder still he'd left it open. It was like— for a moment I had no idea what this was like, and then I realized I was wrong. I understood. For the first time since we had met, I understood Aya perfectly. I cursed softly, and even that seemed too loud in that still, silent room.

It was like he'd _known_. It was like he'd been expecting one of us to come along and find this box. It was like he hadn't wanted us thinking, I shouldn't be looking in here, and packing his secret box off unopened…

And that was when I realized that Aya had understood he was going to die.

"Bastard," I heard myself saying, and my voice was low and bitter. I sounded like someone I'd never met. Would never have wanted to meet. "That _bastard_!"

I opened the box anyway. I always did like to make life difficult for myself.

I don't know what I was expecting to see. Love letters, maybe, or some kind of note lying on top of it all telling us what to do now, but apart from a sealed envelope that couldn't have been there for more than a couple of weeks, there was nothing there at all. Nothing that most guys would have thought worth hiding away, at any rate. Most of it they wouldn't even have bothered hanging onto, if they'd gotten bored with it.

All it was was boy stuff. A Tokyo Giants cap, a couple of battered paperbacks, crime novels or thrillers by the looks of them, an old Gameboy (it still worked) and its cartridges, _Zelda_ and _Bomberman_ and _Tetris_, of course, and, odd guy out, a _Sailor Moon _game; a student travel card showing Aya aged about sixteen, in uniform and smart-boy glasses; a CD, X-Japan's_ Dahlia_ and Youji had the same album and yet Aya had never let on he liked it. I found a handful of photographs in an old paper wallet, and the faces were the faces of strangers. A few showed the same girl, a girl in a private-school uniform with colored clips in her bobbed black hair; three put her arm in arm with Aya – _Ran_ – beaming and flashing a peace sign at a camera just like all the high-school girls do. At the very bottom, there was a textbook. High school math, its pages filled with diligent annotations in the cramped yet neat hand I'd grown so familiar with.

It felt like a shameful thing for me to sit there picking over the shreds of Aya's life before. I probably should have been crying, or at least feeling bad, but I wasn't. Here I was, a repentant murderer turning his victim's belongings over in his hands as if he were trying to force himself to feel sorry, and yet I wasn't feeling anything at all. The things trapped in this box could have belonged to almost any guy, but they didn't seem to have anything to do with the man I had killed.

Even in my own head it felt like a stupid attempt to excuse my own sins but all I could think, looking at the sad little bits that were all that remained of a man I'd never known, was that Ran Fujimiya had died long ago…

His few possessions told me nothing about Ran save that, once upon a time, he could have been any other nice young guy from a good family, with a loving home and a bright future – but that had been over and gone long before the two of us even met. The only thing there was left for me to do was to tidy him away again, put him back on his shelf to be forgotten completely. I tucked the photographs back in their wallet and bundled Ran's few possessions back into the box, only hesitating when it came to the letter.

It was to her, of course. Only to her.

I hadn't expected him to think of us when he thought of the people he was leaving behind, but it still hurt. There was Omi, grieving and exhausted, sat struggling to concentrate over a high-school math book of his own; there was Sakura weeping into her pillow; there were the girls, missing him all wrong. And then there was me, closing my eyes to sleep and seeing him lying dead on the tiles, blood and matter leaking from the back of his head—and Aya was thinking of her. Only of her, always.

And me? I was simply the weapon. There I am in the store, singing under my breath as I mop the floor and all he sees when he looks at me is an exit. Some men kill themselves with knives or poison or guns, if they can get them; some jump in front of subway trains; the samurai had fallen on their swords. But Aya had wanted it to be perfect, he had wanted to be sure, and so Aya had used me.

It hurt like Hell to think that all I'd become to him by the end was a way to escape. Even a _sorry_ was pointless, still less the why of it, though what the Hell difference knowing _why_ would make now I had no idea. Even if I knew why he'd done it I still wouldn't understand, and he might as well have apologized to his fucking knife as said sorry to me.

Aya died thinking I hated him, that I just wouldn't _care_ when he'd gone…

But then he'd never really known me, either.

It would have been the easiest thing in the world to tear open the letter and read it, but I didn't. I didn't even consider it. I just didn't want to know what his excuse was: I didn't want her to have to, either. My fingers curled about the crisp white envelope, crumpling it beneath my grasp. It was just what they did in the movies and it always looked hokey as Hell, and here I was crushing the letter in my palm. Aya Fujimiya, the envelope read in those same tiny, careful characters, and, after that, an address – a student residence in Nerima ward. He'd thought of everything; even the stamp had been provided, stuck so neat and square at the top of the envelope he could have placed it with a set square. All I had to do was drop the letter in the mail…

"No, Aya," I said. "No, I won't."

I couldn't. I couldn't do that to her. Aya had loved his sister, I know he had loved her dearly. How could he want to drag _her_ into this as well?

"I'm sorry."

So, stood on the balcony, I burned the letter. Holding one corner between finger and thumb, I watched the flame eat its way across the envelope, consuming the address, watched as the thick flakes of ash were tugged away by the breeze. I'd hurt her quite enough already without adding the truth, when the truth would bring her nothing but further pain. If nobody else were to believe he had died saving me, _she_ at least should have that comfort. I could do no more for the Fujimiya family, but I could at least do this.

Now Ran's memory box sits on my own shelves and, slipped inside the cover of _The Tokyo Zodiac Murders_, there's a small scrap of paper with singed and blackened edges that looks just a little like the corner of an envelope.

Scars, like memories, fade, but some things are too important to forget.

-_ende_-


End file.
